In August 1976, a 44-year-old headmaster named Mabalo Lokela arrived back in the town of Yambuku in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after two weeks spent touring with a local mission. A few days after his return, he checked into the local hospital with nosebleeds, dysentery, and a fever. The doctors treated him for malaria, but to no avail. Lokela got worse. In early September, two weeks after his first symptoms, he died. And meanwhile, other people who had come into contact with him started getting sick.

Over the next three months, 318 people became infected, and 280 of them died. That outbreak, and another that took place simultaneously in South Sudan, alerted the world to the existence of a lethal new disease, which eventually took the name of the waterway on which Yambuku is situated—the Ebola River.

Ebola is famously deadly, but not inevitably so. Around 12 percent of those who were infected in the Yambuku outbreak survived their brush with the disease, and many of them are still around today. They’ve lived through seven more documented Ebola outbreaks in the DRC, the latest of which took place this May, less than 350 kilometers away from Yambuku. They’ve watched from afar as the biggest Ebola outbreak in history ravaged West Africa.

An Ebola vaccine that has been in development for 15 years has been shown in a clinical trial to be up to 100 percent effective at preventing the deadly virus. But it won’t stop sporadic cases from popping up, nor will it be immediately available to some who are most vulnerable to the virus.

Marie-Pierre Preziosi, head of the Initiative for Vaccine Research at the World Health Organization, which led the trial, says the vaccine is only meant to be used to stop the spread of an existing outbreak. Once WHO identifies new Ebola cases, only people most at risk of being exposed to a sick person—like family members, health-care providers, or sanitation workers—would receive the vaccine if it’s approved.

Preziosi says the vaccine won’t be administered as a preventive vaccine on a large scale, like vaccine campaigns for smallpox or polio, because there’s not enough data to show how long the vaccine’s protection lasts. If the vaccine is approved by drug regulators, it wouldn’t be used for a “long-term strategy” to thwart new Ebola cases, she says.

Three years after the start of the world’s worst Ebola epidemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) has created a programme to improve its response to disease outbreaks and to prevent another such calamity

Three years after the start of the world’s worst Ebola epidemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) has created a programme to improve its response to disease outbreaks and to prevent another such calamity

In June, WHO director-general Margaret Chan named medical epidemiologist Peter Salama to lead a new health-emergencies programme intended to streamline the agency’s response to crises. As part of that programme, the WHO has launched the Emerging Diseases Clinical Assessment and Response Network (EDCARN) to provide guidance on how to care for people during disease outbreaks.

Global-health experts say that the changes are a step in the right direction, but both developing and wealthy nations must do much more to avert another devastating epidemic. Some are also concerned that the WHO programme will have trouble getting the funding it needs to succeed, because of a lack of monetary support from member nations.

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa was an unprecedented health crisis, causing more than 11,000 deaths and destabilizing three countries. It eventually mobilized a coalition of countries from the United States to China, as well as the African and European unions. Neither the nations most affected nor the international community were prepared for an epidemic of a highly lethal virus on such a scale. They had to learn on the fly: hands-on experience of Ebola outbreaks and patient care was scant. We now have a much larger body of experts and knowledge, which will be invaluable for preventing and controlling future outbreaks.

Two very different books on the epidemic have now emerged. Anthropologist Paul Richards’ Ebolais an original account of how Sierra Leone in general, and 26 villages there in particular, interpreted the epidemic and wider responses to it, and acted on it at its peak. Ebola’s Messagehas a broad interdisciplinary focus on West Africa’s outbreak. Covering aspects from media response to bioethics, it is edited by philosopher Nicholas Evans, molecular epidemiologist Tara Smith and computational epidemiologist Maimuna Majumder.

As Gaye Dumbai came trudging up the dirt road, heading toward the overgrown cemetery where his mother is buried, villagers came out of their houses despite the pouring rain to get a closer look at him. “Aya, Gaye, you going to your ma grave?” Naomi Tama, a local market woman, called to him

As Gaye Dumbai came trudging up the dirt road, heading toward the overgrown cemetery where his mother is buried, villagers came out of their houses despite the pouring rain to get a closer look at him. “Aya, Gaye, you going to your ma grave?” Naomi Tama, a local market woman, called to him

“Aya, Gaye, you going to your ma grave?” Naomi Tama, a local market woman, called to him, following him up the muddy path until he cut into the bush toward the grave. She trailed after him a few more yards, then stopped, overcome.

“Aye, man,” she said in a show of sympathy. Then again and again. “Aye, man.”

In the chronicles of the epidemic that swept through this country like the plague, Mr. Dumbai, 36, is considered a success story. He is an Ebola survivor. For almost 30 days, he battled the virus, first on his own, covered in a blanket and sitting over a pot of hot water steeped with tea leaves, the African way. When that did not work, he spent six days in a local hospital waiting to get a diagnosis, and 16 days at a hospital in Monrovia fighting the debilitating loss of blood and fluid.

A group led by researchers at the Toronto General Research Institute and Canadian Blood Services have tested a combination of drugs on Ebola, and published their findings in the Journal of Neglected Diseases. Anyone who has kept even one eye on the news would not consider Ebola “neglected,” but this team argues that it is—not due to lack of interest, but due to lack of access to the correct facilities

A group led by researchers at the Toronto General Research Institute and Canadian Blood Services have tested a combination of drugs on Ebola, and published their findings in the Journal of Neglected Diseases. Anyone who has kept even one eye on the news would not consider Ebola “neglected,” but this team argues that it is—not due to lack of interest, but due to lack of access to the correct facilities

Right now, if you want to test drugs on the Ebola virus in a lab, you need a level 4 containment facility. The CDC guidelines for levels of containment require the following of level 4 facilities: “walls, floors, and ceilings of the laboratory must be constructed to form a sealed internal shell to facilitate fumigation and prohibit animal and insect intrusion.”

Everyone has to wear a full “positive pressure suit,” meaning that if there is a tear, air escapes from the suit instead of pouring into it. The facility needs its own ventilation system, and that system must be alarmed in case it malfunctions or someone tampers with it. These facilities are expensive, and therefore rare. But with viruses like Ebola, there’s no other choice.

In the middle of the devastating Ebola outbreak last year, one photographer set out to Sierra Leone and Liberia to help the disease’s survivors tell their stories.

New York-based photographer and human rights researcher Daniel Jack Lyons traveled to the villages of Gbolakai-Ta, Liberia, and Rosanda, Sierra Leone, in the summer of 2015 on commission for the International Medical Corps. His goal was to document the impact of the virus in those two communities.

In addition to taking his own photographs, Lyon gave villagers cameras so they, too, could share their stories about fighting Ebola.